Sparse and Safe Frequency Regulation for Inverter Intensive Microgrids

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel control method for inverter-rich microgrids that ensures frequency safety and reduces communication needs by combining sparse feedback with control barrier functions, validated through simulations.

Contribution

It proposes a unified control framework integrating sparse linear feedback and safety constraints via control barrier functions for microgrid frequency regulation.

Findings

Effective frequency regulation with reduced communication.

Ensures safety by maintaining frequency within specified regions.

Validated through extensive numerical simulations.

Abstract

This paper developed a novel control approach for the sparse and safe frequency regulation for inverter intensive microgrids (MGs). In the scenario, the inverters and external grids are expected to reach a synchronized desired frequency under regulations. To this end, the active power set-point acting as a control from a high-level controller is designed while considering two important performance metrics "sparsity" and "safety", which are to reduce the information exchange between controllers and ensure that the frequency keeps in safety regions during the whole operation process. Our proposed control design framework allows the sparse linear feedback controller (SLFC) to be unified with a family of conditions for safe control using control barrier functions. A quadratic programming (QP) problem is then constructed, and the real-time control policy is obtained by solving the QP problem. Importantly, we also found that the real-time control for each inverter depends on the cross-layer communication network topology which is the union of the one between controllers from SLFC and the one determined by the power flow network. Furthermore, our approach has been validated through extensive numerical simulations.